Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy

by John Keegan

  Kaiser Wilhelm II, half English though he was and an honorary admiral in the Royal Navy, espoused Tirpitz’s risk theory wholeheartedly. Love-hate of Britain’s world pre-eminence informed all his strategic thinking. He longed for parity with, even superiority over, the British battle fleet, while recognising that the costs of his vast army precluded battleship building on a British scale. He also wished to create an overseas empire on the British model. That required the creation of a fleet of cruisers for foreign service. Tirpitz, initially complaisant about cruiser building, became hostile to the project after the passing of the Naval Law in 1900. By then, however, Germany’s imperial project was in full swing. It followed the new empire’s commercial development. German foreign trading companies had established bridgeheads in east, west and southwest Africa, in New Guinea and in the Pacific islands during the late nineteenth century. By 1914 the German flag flew over German East Africa (today mainland Tanzania), Togo and the Cameroons in west Africa, northern Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Island groups of the Bismarcks, the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Marianas and Samoa. Some of the territories had been annexed outright; others such as the Carolines, remote atolls without apparent value, had been peremptorily purchased from Spain during the era of its imperial collapse following defeat by the United States in 1898. Germany had also joined with other major European powers in annexing coastal enclaves from China after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. Its prize was the harbour of Tsingtao, on the Yellow Sea, which it rapidly transformed into a well-equipped port for its Far Eastern cruiser fleet.

  Germany’s overseas possessions were linked to home by cable, in the same way as were Britain’s. Acutely aware, however, of its cable network’s vulnerability, Germany also early invested in the new technology of wireless and by 1914 had “the most advanced network” in the world.8 Telefunken, the leading German radio company, was a pioneer of “continuous wave” transmission, which permitted the use of numerous separate channels and so “vastly increased the amount of traffic that could be put ‘on the air.’ “9 Telefunken also worked hard to increase the range over which Germany’s government stations could broadcast. By 1914 the main transmitter at Nauen, outside Berlin, could reach Kamina in Togoland, 3,000 miles away, while Kamina could communicate with Windhoek in German Southwest Africa, Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa and Duala in the Cameroons. There were other wireless stations at Yap and Augaur in the Carolines, Nauru in the Marshalls, Apia in Samoa, Rabaul in the Bismarcks and at Tsingtao. The more distant stations, however, were out of range of Berlin and Togoland and could relay only messages sent by cable, of which that between Monrovia in Liberia and Pernambuco in Brazil alone was both German-owned and in what, in 1914, would prove to be neutral territory.

  By 1914, however, all major German warships, like those in the British, American, French, Italian and Russian fleets, were also equipped with wireless which, in favourable circumstances, could transmit over 1,000 miles. This was to prove particularly important for Britain’s naval operations at the outset of the Great War because, out of a complacency bred by its dominance of the world cable network, it had not kept pace with Germany in building long-range shore-based transmitters. In 1909 it possessed only three long-range stations, at Cleethorpes in Britain, at Gibraltar and in Malta; although a contract was signed with the Marconi Company in 1912 to build an Imperial Wireless Chain, it was not completed until 1915–16, so that at the outbreak of war most of the empire’s stations, including that in the remote South Atlantic colony of the Falklands, were low-power and of limited range. Strategic communication was maintained by the cable network which the Committee of Imperial Defence had assured itself could be interrupted only by a programme of cable-cutting which Britain alone, with its twenty-eight cable ships, twice the number of those of the rest of the world combined, was equipped to undertake.10

  When war came in 1914, therefore, the naval campaign in distant waters was to be conducted in strangely disparate fashion: a compact German cruiser fleet, only intermittently able to communicate with the home base, was matched against a much more numerous British enemy—supported in places by Japanese, French and Russian naval units—controlled by a mixture of wireless and cable communication which proved almost as erratic. Technically, the means of intelligence and command employable by the admirals on both sides surpassed that available to Nelson and Bonaparte in 1798 by a factor as large as the difference in size between the seas in which they operated, which is to say between the Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean. In practice, the meeting—and missing—of fleets that took place was almost as haphazard as theirs.

  THE BATTLE OF CORONEL

  The outbreak of war between Britain and Germany on 4 August 1914 found the main battle fleets concentrated in their home bases. The German High Seas Fleet was in harbour in its North Sea ports, the British Grand Fleet at anchor in the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow, within the Orkney Islands off the north of Scotland. The Grand Fleet exceeded the High Seas Fleet in strength by twenty-one dreadnought battleships and four battlecruisers to thirteen dreadnoughts and four battlecruisers. Both navies also had numbers of obsolete pre-dreadnoughts, the newer with the battle fleets, the older elsewhere; the Germans kept theirs in the Baltic, the British at Portland where they blocked the English Channel. The Grand Fleet’s base at Scapa Flow had been chosen so as to deny the Germans exit from the North Sea.11

  Both fleets also had large numbers of heavy and light cruisers and destroyers, the British considerably more than the Germans. While the latter kept theirs mostly with the High Seas Fleet, the British from the outset based many at Harwich, in the southern North Sea, whence they patrolled aggressively toward the German coast. They were constantly on the alert lest the Germans “came out,” though their strategy was to do so only if they were certain of being able to beat a safe retreat. The Royal Navy wanted to destroy the Kaiser’s navy; it, by contrast, sought merely to hold the British “at risk.” It did so as long as it remained intact and in harbour; but while it stayed there, the naval situation in home waters was a perfect stalemate.

  Only in more distant seas was there the possibility of an unforeseen encounter in the old Nelsonian style. The Mediterranean was such an arena of uncertainty, and there, right at the beginning, Germany’s Mittelmeerdivision, a rather grandiose title for a force of two ships established in 1912, achieved a dramatic success. The battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau eluding the efforts of the British Mediterranean Fleet to neutralise them, succeeded in gaining Constantinople and joining the Turkish navy. At the beginning of November they sailed into the Black Sea to bombard Russian ports, thus inaugurating Turkey’s war with Russia and so with its British and French allies. One outcome of this development would be the Gallipoli campaign; another was the court-martial of Admiral Troubridge “for failure to pursue the chase of His Imperial German Majesty’s ship Goeben, being an enemy then flying.”12 Troubridge was acquitted but never again employed afloat. It was an appalling humiliation for a descendant of one of Nelson’s most trusted captains, and it was to have repercussions that went far beyond the Mediterranean.

  Some memory of Troubridge’s misjudgement may indeed have influenced another British cruiser admiral at the outset of the Second World War, when a “superior force,” the German 11-inch-gun pocket battleship Graf Spee, was cornered by one heavy and two light British cruisers, Exeter, Ajax and Achilles, off Montevideo, Uruguay, at the mouth of the River Plate. The British then did what Troubridge was accused at his court-martial of not doing, so disposing themselves that, by manoeuvre, they nullified the Graf Spee’s superiority in range and weight of shell and forced it into flight.

  Graf Spee was so christened at her launch in memory of Germany’s other leading distant-water admiral of 1914, the commander of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, Maximilian Graf von Spee. A south German aristocrat, a Catholic, von Spee differed in character from the cold east Prussian Protestants who dominated the German army. Sensitive and warm-hearted, he wa
s revered by his officers and men; but they also recognised his fighting spirit and his dedication to the German imperial idea; in those aspects he was as much a subject of the Kaiser as Hindenburg, Ludendorff and von Lettow-Vorbeck, the charismatic German commander in east Africa, with whose brilliantly evasive campaign in the bush his own buccaneering exploits at sea were to be intertwined.

  In August 1914 Germany’s distant cruiser force consisted of eight ships: five formed the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron proper, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Leipzig, Nürnberg and Emden, based at Tsingtao in China. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were “armoured cruisers,” as the type was then known, mounting a main armament of eight 8.2-inch guns and capable of twenty knots; both had been launched in 1907, and they were the crack gunnery ships of the Kaiser’s overseas fleet. Leipzig, Nürnberg and Emden were light cruisers, launched in 1906–8, effectively unarmoured but mounting ten 4.1-inch guns and capable of twenty-four knots. Of the same type were Königsberg, based in east Africa, and Dresden, which was cruising off the Atlantic coast of South America. At the moment of the war’s outbreak, Leipzig was off the Pacific coast of Mexico, on station to protect German nationals during the current civil war; Nürnberg was en route to relieve her but was nearer China than her destination. Emden had just left Tsingtao, on news of the heightening tension in Europe, and was steaming to meet the main squadron in the Central Pacific. Her role had been to protect and organise the colliers which were to join von Spee if a cruiser campaign were to begin.

  Tirpitz, the creator of the German navy, had disapproved of spending on cruisers. In the memorandum he wrote in June 1897, on which Imperial Germany’s naval programme was based, he wrote that “commerce raiding and transatlantic war against England is so hopeless, because of the shortage of bases on our side and the superfluity on England’s side, that we must ignore this sort of war.”13 He was later to alter his view but it determined the composition and disposition of the German fleet in 1914, very much to Britain’s advantage. It was also objectively correct. Britain had piecemeal, over 250 years, accumulated a constellation of bases across the world, including—among those which were to figure importantly in the coming cruiser war—Hong Kong in China, Singapore in the East Indies, Aden in Arabia, the Cocos and Keeling group in the Indian Ocean and the Falklands in the South Atlantic. There were hundreds more, providing cable and often wireless facilities and also, of even greater significance, coaling stocks.

  Oil had just begun to supplant coal as the fuel source in the most modern warships; the turbines in Britain’s new fast battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class were oil-fired. Most, however, remained dependent on coal. That required a return to base at less than weekly intervals or, even more tiresomely, a rendezvous with a collier and the tedious, difficult business of transferring hundreds of tons of coal from deck to deck, either in an anchorage or, should weather permit, in the open sea. The Royal Navy, with its multiplicity of coaling stations, could spare itself the trouble of coaling at sea. The German cruisers, in the weeks to come, would cruise encumbered by accompanying colliers or be forced to arrange rendezvous with detached colliers in remote inlets.

  Despite the difficulties, and despite the disapproval of Tirpitz, Germany’s overseas navy was committed to the war against commerce from the moment of the declaration. Orders stated that “in the event of a war against Great Britain, or a coalition including Great Britain, ships abroad are to carry out cruiser warfare unless otherwise ordered. Those vessels which are not suitable for cruiser warfare are to fit out as auxiliary cruisers. The areas of operations are the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific . . . Our ships abroad cannot count in wartime either on reinforcements or large quantities of supplies . . . The aim of cruiser warfare is to damage enemy trade; this must be effected by engaging equal or inferior enemy forces, if necessary.”14 The Kaiser’s personal instructions to cruiser commanders went further, urging them to seek an honourable outcome in all circumstances, where honour was understood to mean fighting to the last. Earlier orders, not cancelled, held out the hope, however, of inflicting defeat on potential enemies in foreign waters, citing in 1907 the superiority enjoyed by the Asiatic Squadron over the French, Russian and even British forces in its area. That was optimistic but not unrealistic, as events would show. Germany’s colonial navy in the years before the war formed a cohesive unit of high quality, both in personnel and material. The same could not be said of its local opponents, who, though numerically superior, counted on too many old ships manned by second-class crews to be reckoned really formidable.

  What was undeniable was the vulnerability of the enemy’s trade. Germany, with 2,090 steamships, was the world’s second largest mercantile power, a fact often overlooked in discussion of its reasons for building the High Seas Fleet. Its merchant fleet was, however, vastly exceeded in size by the British, with 8,587 steamships; when those of its empire were added, they amounted to 43 per cent of the world’s shipping. They sailed every sea along every trade route, carrying not only the majority of the world’s trade but also supplies essential to the home country’s survival, including two-thirds of its foodstuffs.15 The Admiralty, moreover, had come to disbelieve in convoy, which had occupied so much of the Royal Navy’s energies in the French Wars of 1793–1815. Apart from troop convoys, it had no plans to protect merchant shipping in 1914 and made none until the crisis of the U-boat war in 1917. It trusted to the vastness of the oceans to protect merchantmen, sailing independently, at the war’s outbreak and for three years thereafter.

  It also expected, of course, that its own distant squadrons would hunt down and destroy enemy commerce raiders should they interfere. Despite the concentration of the navy’s most modern warships of all classes in or near the North Sea, enough still remained to assure Britain’s worldwide naval presence in the distant waters of its eight historic overseas stations: China, New Zealand, Australia, North America and West Indies, South America, Africa, Mediterranean, and East Indies. Some of the ships on station when war broke out—river gunboats and obsolete cruisers—were unfit for oceanic operations. Those capable to stand in the line of battle included the old battleship Triumph, armoured cruisers Minotaur and Hampshire and light cruisers Newcastle and Yarmouth on the China station; the modern light cruiser Glasgow on the South American station; the old battleship Swiftsure, the light cruiser Dartmouth and the obsolete light cruiser Fox on the East Indies station; and on the Australian and New Zealand stations the modern battlecruiser Australia and the light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne of the Royal Australian Navy and the obsolete light cruisers Encounter and Pioneer. Australia and New Zealand (which had paid for the battlecruiser New Zealand, serving with the Grand Fleet in home waters) had agreed that their navies’ ships should come under Admiralty control in war circumstances.

  Though numerous—fourteen in all—these warships were of mixed quality. Australia could sink any German colonial cruiser at no risk to herself at all, but she was to be tied, at the outset, to convoying the troopships of the Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force; Dartmouth, Sydney and Melbourne were the equal of the modern German light cruisers; the British armoured cruisers, Minotaur and Hampshire, were obsolescent and not up to the German class. Armoured cruisers had become an anomaly: too weak to fight battlecruisers, too slow to catch light cruisers, capable only of combat with others of their own class. It was to be the Royal Navy’s misfortune in the coming cruiser war that its armoured cruisers were the inferior of the German, inferior as both were to the new battlecruiser class.

  In the early weeks of the war, Britain was to send reinforcements to the overseas stations. Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, commanding on the North America and West Indies stations, received the armoured cruisers Suffolk, Berwick, Essex and Lancaster; none was to take part in the cruiser war, but their sister ship Monmouth was. Detached to South America, she eventually joined the squadron Cradock was to form for anti-cruiser action. So did Good Hope, another armoured cruiser detached to him, into which, o
n 15 August, he shifted his flag. His final reinforcements were the old battleship Canopus, launched in 1896—its 12-inch guns were manned by elderly reservists, and its engine-room was supervised by a chief engineer who, as events would reveal, was mentally unfit for service—and the Otranto, an armed merchant cruiser. Armed merchant cruisers—to serve, with very mixed results, in both world wars—were liners or fast freighters, fitted with guns and crewed by naval officers and ratings, which admiralties expected to give useful service as convoy escorts or commerce raiders. In favourable circumstances some did; in others they proved deathtraps.

  The Germans had also commissioned armed merchant cruisers; indeed, to its merchant fleet of high-speed liners of such companies as Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutsche-Lloyd belonged some of the fastest passenger ships in the world. At the outbreak most instantly took refuge in neutral ports, particularly in North and South America; but their captains, who frequently belonged, as many of their sailors did, to the German naval reserve, stood ready to join the German raiding force when opportunity offered. When guns and ammunition could be transferred to them, as was to happen, they became effective units in the commerce war.

  Other elements in the commerce war were ships of the French, Russian and Japanese navies. France, with bases in Indo-China and the Pacific islands, had several cruisers and destroyers in Asiatic waters, including the Dupleix and Montcalm; Russia, not a serious Pacific naval power since its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, nevertheless had one or two units deployed; Japan, which entered the war against Germany on 23 August, altered the balance of naval power in the Pacific to Germany’s disadvantage altogether. Japan, whose army had been trained by Germany, had no quarrel with the Kaiser’s empire at all. Its declaration of hostilities was narrowly selfish. It correctly anticipated that, by aligning itself with Britain and France, it was likely to acquire possession of the German island chains of the Marianas, Carolines and Bismarcks. It did so; in the short term, the adherence of Japan to the anti-German alliance was also of great importance in limiting the German cruiser threat. In the long term, Japan’s annexation of Germany’s central and south Pacific islands laid the basis for its successful aggression against the European and American Pacific empires in 1941–42. Rabaul, in particular, Germany’s main base in the Papuan archipelago, was to become Japan’s principal place d’armes in the struggle with the Americans and Australians for New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in 1942–43.